Hot Wheels and High Heels (3 page)

“So, what’s the deal?” Tony asked. “Did you feel like taking a trip down memory lane and arresting someone?”

“He wanted his car back. Pulled a gun.”

“Bad move, kid,” Tony said. “Guess you didn’t know who you were messing with. Next time you might want to think twice before pulling a gun on the nice repo man.”

That prompted the kid to let out a string of curse words directed at everything from Tony’s parentage to his intellect to his religious affiliation. The kid might have been a little deficient where proper English was concerned, but John had to give him points for creativity.

A few minutes later, the cops showed up, two guys John had never seen before, both of them so young that he wondered if the Plano PD had taken to trolling high schools looking for recruits. He told them what had happened and that he would come to the station later to make a statement. They stuffed the kid into the back of a patrol car and took off.

John collapsed in his desk chair with a heavy sigh.
I should have listened to my family and gone with the Subway franchise
, he thought. Unfortunately, eight years as an auto theft detective with the Plano PD had taught him more about repossessing cars than making sandwiches. After all, who knew more about how to steal cars than a cop who went after car thieves?

Tony tossed some paperwork onto John’s desk. “Got the Viper.”

“Any trouble?”

“Nah. The guy about wet his pants when I said I was repossessing his car. All he was worried about was the neighbors seeing me.”

Well, that was nothing new. Most of John’s business involved repossessing the high-dollar assets of west Plano doctors, lawyers, and other assorted bigwigs whose fortunes were tied to stock market trends and overspending wives. Those guys rarely gave him the kind of trouble he got from lowlifes whose fortunes came from dealing drugs.

Tony looked around. “Hey, where’s the girl? Uh . . . What was her name?”

“Rona? Fired her this afternoon.”

Tony blinked. “Now why did you go and do that?”

“She had the brain of an amoeba.”

“Brain? Who was looking at her brain?” Tony popped a Tic Tac into his mouth. “We finally get a decent-looking woman around here, and you get all hung up on competency. What’s the matter with you?”

“I have a business to run.”

“I was going to
marry
that woman. Till death do us part. I was in
love
.”

“You were in love with her thirty-eight Ds.”

“No. We had a cosmic connection. I could feel it.”

“What was her name again?”

Tony blinked, then gave John a smug smile. “Rhonda. You thought I didn’t remember, didn’t you?”

“No, buddy. You’re right on top of things.”

“So why’d you fire her? I mean, specifically.”

“She painted her nails at her desk. Stunk like hell, but I let it go. She talked on the phone for an hour. I looked the other way. Then she started to file.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Until I heard her singing the alphabet.”

Tony winced. “Well, if she could get most of the way to Z—”

“I swear to God I’ll vote for a chimpanzee in the next presidential election if he promises to do something about the damned educational system.”

“Did she cry when you fired her?” Tony asked.

John winced at the memory. “Of course. And that made the experience even more enjoyable.”

“So right now she’s probably feeling pretty down, huh?”

“I expect so.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “You have her home number, right?”

John shook his head, wondering if he’d been like Tony at twenty-eight, looking around every corner for an opportunity to get laid. He guessed he must have been. But late-night liaisons with predawn departures just didn’t do it for him anymore, and no woman had ever come along whom he cared to get permanent with.

Of course, being a loser in the marriage department had made him a real standout in his family full of . . . well,
families.
At their last reunion in Tyler, his female relatives from across the state of Texas had chattered about him in hushed whispers, speculating how such a handsome man could have reached age forty-two without making it to the altar at least once.

“Look how he’s tossing back the Jack. I bet he has a drinking problem.”

“Maybe the trouble’s down south. Size may not matter, but functionality’s another thing entirely.”

“Suppose all that macho’s for show? Uncle Raymond the bricklayer went queer, you know. I mean, who’d have ever thought that?”

After that weekend, John had left believing that “bless your heart” was actually his last name.

If he’d been living a few centuries ago, everyone would have just said “he’s not the marrying kind” and let it go at that. Now they speculated on exactly which part of his anatomy or personality was defective and thanked God those mutant strands of DNA hadn’t infiltrated their branches of the family tree.

The truth was that while he had no shortage of women in his life, marriage just didn’t appeal to him. Never had. Maybe it was because he’d watched virtually everyone he knew walk into matrimony and right back out of it again. It took some guys two or three times to get the picture. It was as if they were hitting themselves in the head with hammers and trying to figure out where all the pain was coming from.

“Go ahead,” he told Tony, flipping open a file and scribbling down the number. “Give
Rhonda
a call. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear from you.”

“Yep. As long as I tell her what a bastard you were to fire her.”

The phone rang, and John picked it up. After a short conversation, he hung up with a smile of satisfaction.

“What’s up?” Tony asked.

“Got a line on a car. It may not be there for long, though. Mind dropping me off so I can pick it up?”

“Sure.”

John grabbed a key from his desk drawer, grateful he had one for this particular car. Hot-wiring could make a mess of a steering column, and there was always danger of damage whenever he grabbed one with the tow truck. Those were usually his only options, but every once in a while he dealt with a company that kept a key for every vehicle it financed in case somebody stopped making the payments. And that meant all he had to do was unlock the car and drive it away, which was the easiest five hundred bucks a man could make.

As he and Tony closed up shop and headed out, John felt a whole lot better than he had a few minutes ago. Yeah, it had been a hell of a day, but he had no doubt that getting behind the wheel of a sweet little Mercedes Roadster was going to perk him right up.

Darcy grabbed Pepé and trudged up the wooden steps that led to her parents’ front door, wincing as they groaned painfully, shrunken as they were from years of shriveling in the blazing Texas sun. She knocked, and a few seconds later her mother came to the door wearing a pink bathrobe, her hair in a towel. When she saw her daughter’s state of distress, her eyes got big and horrified. She shoved the screen door open and pulled Darcy inside.

“Darcy? What’s wrong? You look like hell. Have you been crying? What’s happened?”

It was the rapid-fire interrogation of a woman who lives with the absolute certainty that some dreadful event is always lurking just around the corner, waiting to snatch her up in its cold, clammy grasp. Of course, she was never right about that, and Darcy’s father never let her forget it.

Today, though, Lyla Dumphries was going to be vindicated.

Darcy gave her the gist of the situation, and Lyla wheezed in a breath and grasped her throat as if she were stroking out.

“Did you hear that, Clayton? Warren left Darcy. Just like that. He left her high and dry without a dime to her name!”

“Uh-huh. I heard.”

“See, I told you it couldn’t last. Didn’t I tell you it couldn’t last?”

“It lasted . . . what? Fourteen years?” He returned to his Naugahyde throne in the living room and snapped open his newspaper. “Pretty good run, if you ask me.”

“Other people are living in her house, for God’s sake!”

“It’s big enough. She won’t even run into them.”

Lyla huffed with disgust and turned to Darcy. “Forget your father. You know how useless he is in a crisis. Sit down.”

She dragged Darcy to the kitchen table and slid into a chair beside her, grabbing her cigarettes and lighting one with the practiced
flick-puff-exhale
of a thirty-year smoker. She tossed the lighter onto the kitchen table, her brows drawn together and her mouth drooping in a taut, worried frown.

“So you’re telling me there’s no money left? None at all? He took every penny?”

Oh, God.
It sounded way worse when somebody said it out loud. “Yes,” Darcy said, her voice shuddering. “Every penny.”

“I can’t believe this is happening. Didn’t you put anything away? Anything at all?”

Darcy felt like a fool. Sure,
now
she could see she should have developed an alternative plan somewhere along the line, like maybe siphoning money from their joint accounts and sticking it under the mattress. Hindsight sucked.

“I have a hundred and eighty-three dollars in my wallet,” she said. “Plus a few pesos.”

Lyla groaned, taking several short puffs on her cigarette, interspersed with a lot of eye shifting and fingernail tapping. She had long since given up the idea of rising to the top of society as a whole, but she could damn well be the cream of the crop at Wingate Manufactured Home Park. Unfortunately, most of that status came from the fact that her daughter was married to a
chief financial officer
at a
big corporation
in
west Plano
and lived in a
gated community
of homes worth over
half a million dollars.
Those buzz words piqued all kinds of interest among people who watched
Wheel of Fortune
and dreamed of winning a plasma TV.

“So, what did you do?” Lyla asked.

“I haven’t done anything yet,” Darcy said. “I just found out.”

“No. I mean, what did you do to make him leave you?”

Darcy drew back. “I didn’t
do
anything!”

“Of course you did. It’s not hard to hang on to a man once you’ve hooked him. Even a rich one. You had to have done something.”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything! Everything was fine when I left, and then when I came home—”

“Oh, God. It was the sex, wasn’t it? You stopped giving him sex.”

Darcy groaned. “Mom—”

“Haven’t I told you how dangerous that is? If you don’t give a man sex, he’s out the door. Haven’t I
told
you that?”

“If it’s so damned dangerous,” Clayton muttered from the living room, “how come I don’t get any?”

Lyla hurled a look of disgust over her shoulder. “Because I’m
hoping
you’ll leave.”

Darcy closed her eyes, wishing she’d had the foresight to put her fingers in her ears and
la-la-la
her way through that. Why did every visit to her parents’ house have to be a trip through Dysfunction Junction?

She remembered the first time she’d shown her mother Warren’s house. Lyla stood in the entry, gazing around as if she’d passed through the gates of heaven and was basking in paradise. Then she’d pulled Darcy aside and gave her a simple three-point plan on how to hang on to the rich man she’d managed to snag:
Stay thin, don’t let even one strand of gray hair show, and never, ever have a headache at bedtime.

“Maybe there’s another reason he disappeared,” Lyla said. “After all, maybe this wasn’t his fault. Maybe he has a brain tumor. Did you stop to think about that? Brain tumors make people do crazy things.”

Darcy gave her mother a deadpan look. “Do you actually think he has a brain tumor?”

“Hard to say. When we were over at your house last Christmas, he seemed a little distracted. Then again, if he’d had a brain tumor last Christmas, he’d probably be dead by now.” She ground out her cigarette and reached for another one. “You know, I read in the
Star
about a man who was abducted by aliens. Disappeared just like that.”

“Uh-huh,” Clayton said. “Warren was abducted by aliens. And the head alien said, ‘Sure, take a few days to sell your house before we beam you up.’”

“Like you know what happens in outer space?” Lyla snapped, then turned back to Darcy. “Anyway, the guy’s wife thought he’d run off with another woman. I guess in a way he had, since it turned out he was having sex with a little green woman with great big eyeballs.”

Over the years, Darcy had trained herself not to picture Warren doing it with anyone else since she’d had the feeling a few times that he might have been. But not once had she imagined that the other woman was . . . well, an other
worldly
woman.

“He wasn’t abducted by aliens,” Darcy said, as if somebody had to.

“Then what’s your explanation? Do you suppose it
is
another woman? Is that what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she younger than you?”

Darcy looked at her mother dumbly. “If I don’t even know if she exists, how do I know if she’s younger?”

“Oh, she’s younger. Believe me. They’re
always
younger.” She glanced at the sunflower clock on the kitchen wall. “Clayton! Go take a shower. We’re due at the clubhouse in forty-five minutes.”

“You’re leaving?” Darcy asked.

“Have to,” Lyla said. “Monthly potluck. I’d stay home, but I’m the committee chairman this year. If I’m not there, Roxanne will move in and take all the credit.”

Roxanne LaCroix was Lyla’s neighbor across the street who was supposedly her best friend, but both of them had elevated backstabbing to an Olympic event.

“You can come if you want to,” Lyla said.

Darcy thought about the clubhouse, which consisted of a Coke machine, a scruffy pool table, a galley kitchen with yellowed linoleum, and plenty of folding tables for bingo night.

“Uh . . . no, thanks,” Darcy said.

With a squeak of his La-Z-Boy, Clayton rose from his chair and came to the kitchen table, newspaper in hand. “You can stay in the spare bedroom,” he told Darcy. “Your mother will feed you. Here’s thirty bucks to fill up your gas tank.”